


Ushi

by 1nsomnizac



Category: Original Work
Genre: Animal Transformation, Cows, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 09:53:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,113
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10435119
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/1nsomnizac/pseuds/1nsomnizac
Summary: Something's wrong with my friend's gaijin husband





	

**Author's Note:**

> I thought this up this morning at breakfast. Hope you enjoy. EDIT: Formatting errors have been corrected. A brief explanation of concept is in the End Notes.

Inoue-san said that the gaijin had a cow tongue, and that Aki had taken him to a doctor. After Aki and her husband came back, she told me the doctor didn’t know what to do. That was on a Thursday, I think.

I didn’t dislike the gaijin. Aki was a close friend of mine, and she married him, and he seemed decent enough. He was unusually tall and unusually broad-shouldered, and had a friendly face. He spoke very little Japanese, but he had a nice voice, deep and smooth and strange. Aki mostly spoke English with him.

After that day, Aki clearly worried a lot. She said that his tongue was too big for his mouth, so he had trouble eating and talking. The gaijin used to sing beautifully, and I enjoyed hearing the songs he sang in the day while I did my housework. I supposed that that time was now over, and mourned it. After that talk, I only heard him sing one time. It was a wordless, mournful song, and it made me want to cry.

I saw the gaijin about a week after it happened. I was hanging laundry on the verandah when I noticed him sitting outside on his. His eyes were fixed on thick book with a foreign title. His eyes were bloodshot, as though he had been crying. His tongue hung out of his mouth, thick and bumpy and purple, and I couldn’t help but stare. When he noticed me, he hid his face and stood up. He kept repeating “sumimasen” as he retreated, but he slurred the vowels and S-sounds, and I felt so bad about the whole incident that I sent them some homemade soup as an apology. Aki conveyed her husband’s thanks, but he never came out on the verandah without a thick scarf covering him from nose to collar.

I remember gossiping about it to some of the other women in our complex. Kurochiku-san cracked a lewd joke about tongues, but Inoue-san looked appalled, and Mizuki-san, who usually laughed at her dirty jokes, seemed uncomfortable. Inoue-san said that was like beastiality, or something. I admit, it made me curious, since I knew that Aki was trying to have a baby.

A few days later he started leaving the house daily. Even though it was the middle of summer, he never left the house without a heavy jacket, gloves, a wide hat, and a scarf over his face. Aki told me more changes were happening. He was getting taller and wider, I think, because he began to struggle to get through his door. One day I heard mournful sounds all the day through, until the landlord came to tell him to stop. I began to hear loud clomping sounds from their apartment.

Then one day Aki told me that she was moving out. We’re going out to the country, she said, where I can look after him, about an hour’s drive or so. I was sad. Before we both got married, we went to school together, and shared an apartment after that.

Sure enough, the movers appeared and boxes disappeared, and Aki and her husband were no longer there. I still saw her, though. We would call and text each other before we moved to the same building, and we kept at it after she left. Instead of seeing each other in person, we had video chats.

Summer went on. Aki’s anxious tone steadily relaxed as her husband’s condition had stabilized. He had even found a job he could do at home, she said, that brought in enough money to actually buy their land. I asked once if she ever thought about moving back to the city. She told me that her husband had to stay in the country, but she was vague about why.

Tanabata festival came and went. Soon after she invited my husband and I to come out to the country and spend a few days with them. I jumped at the chance.

My husband and I drove out on a bright sunny morning near the end of summer. We arrived at around eleven o’clock. Aki’s property was a wide, fenced-in stretch of land, and it neighbored several similar plots. As my husband drove up, I saw Aki talking to someone in a long black limousine. The limo pulled out as we came in. She came over and greeted us warmly. My husband asked about the limo. Aki said it was a filmmaker that the gaijin worked with. My husband has a certain valuable talent, you know, she said, they pay him a lot for his work, which is why we can afford such a big place.

She led us inside and offered us lunch, an American-style grilled chicken dish over rice. The food was great, and after the hot food and beer sedated my husband, Aki and I went outside to chat.

As we walked in Aki’s field, she said, This is all for my husband, really. He needs a lot of fresh air these days. He was pretty miserable in our apartment, but he’s a lot happier now. In fact, I think he was unhappy in the city before this whole things started. He sometimes said that he didn’t feel like a person sometimes, because he couldn’t communicate, and he was idle a lot. But he likes it here, and his new career puts him in high demand.

I asked what kind of films he was in, and she seemed to want to change the subject. I realized she would have gushed out all the details if she was proud of them, so my question was probably unwelcome. I was about to change the subject when Aki said, Oh, look!

While we talked a large bull had approached. It was big animal, bigger than I realized from seeing them on television. I was scared, but Aki broke into a smile and beckoned to it, so I calmed down. It was a beautiful animal, with wide horns and brown fur.

Your husband tends to cows, too, then, I asked. Aki giggled at that and said, actually, I tend to cows. My husband has become a cowboy.

The bull came up to her and nudged her chest. She stroked its head and rubbed its ears, and invited me to do the same. It nudged my hand gently and stared at me until I looked into its brown eyes. Then it mooed, in a familiar smooth, deep voice.

You’ve already met my husband, said Aki, giggling behind her hand. The bull nodded its horned head. I stood there shocked for a good minute, while Aki giggled and the gaijin cow mooed.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading! In this piece, I intended to evoke a particular style of writing common to translations of postmodern Japanese short stories (I was inspired primarily by Jay Rubin's translation of Little Green Monster by Murakami Haruhi, and Michael Emmerich's translation of Mogera Wogura by Kawakami Hiromi). The plot and its themes also draw a lot from Murakami's genre (subgenre?) of literature, many of which also involve physical manifestations of silent problems. If you wish to read more of these from Japanese authors, I recommend starting with Murakami's Super Frog Saves Tokyo, which you can read here: (http://www.gq.com/story/haruki-murakami-super-frog-saves-tokyo-full-story).


End file.
